The old Prince makes Kitty cry

Dolly comes straight from her own troubles — a daughter born at the end of winter, Lily ill with what she fears is scarlet fever — to hear Kitty's fate. Anna's soldering has not held: Oblonsky is hardly ever home, there is hardly ever money, and Dolly lets herself be deceived, despising him and herself, since no second discovery could wound like the first. The old Prince asks after 'your prodigal' and the unsold forest, then tells Kitty she must wake one morning and say she is quite well and will walk in the frost with Papa. The words make her feel like a detected criminal and she runs out in tears. The Princess flies at him; he answers that she and no one but she is at fault, and that but for what has been done he would have challenged the fop himself. She weeps, he relents. Dolly, rolling up her sleeves, goes to comfort Kitty.

Tolstoy's report on what reconciliation is worth: one paragraph, delivered in passing, undoing Part One's warmest scene. Dolly's discovery that the second betrayal cannot hurt like the first is the novel's coldest piece of marital arithmetic. The Prince's verdict lands on his wife because the alternative — blaming Kitty — is what everyone else will do.